Spent last week making notes for the rewrite of From Earth I Have Arisen. I also repeated a technique I used for the first time on Wet Work: I made a spreadsheet with a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the story, including a timeline, a list of characters introduced, and a summary of the events in each chapter. This helps give me a thousand-foot view of the thing, and saves me a bit of madly flipping through the manuscript, trying to recall when this or that happened, or how much time elapsed between certain events. A handy thing. I’m guessing it will become a regular fixture in my ever-evolving process.
Anyway, I had a laundry list of macro-level problems to fix, and started the week with no real idea how to address most of them. I must have jarred something loose in the ol’ noggin, though, because come the weekend, ideas started to flow. I realized I had kind of pulled some punches with the climax. My muse clued me in on a radical rethink of the ending, one that resolved just about every item on my laundry list. It’s going to require a lot of new material (and here I’d been hoping to cut this thing, get it under 40K), but I’m pretty sure I’m on the right track.
Regular readers of these reports might remember how hard the ending had been for me when writing the first draft. For many weeks, I didn’t have an ending. I remember how relieved I’d been to figure it out.
Turns out that the muse was just letting me off easy. Now that we’re into the rewrite, though, she’s taken off the gloves. What I’m saying here, I have my work cut out for me.
This could take a little longer than I’d been planning. Shocker, I know.
No updates for Write Club.
I’m out.
